Muffat: Apparatus musico-organisticus: Passacaglia in G minor
Rzewski:
Dreams
II
Kerll:
Passacaglia in D minor
Busoni:
Fantasia
contrappuntistica
I have heard a good number of
ambitious musical performances, ambitions fully realised, from Igor Levit,
ranging from his Wigmore Hall Beethoven sonata cycle to a landmark modern performance of Henze’s Tristan in Salzburg. None of
those, however, would outstrip the ambition, again fully realised, of this, his
Pierre Boulez Saal debut recital, culminating in Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, a work which, he owns, is a ‘borderline
piece’, which ‘takes me to the limits of my abilities – mentally,
intellectually, physically’. Those limits, if limits they were, were thrilling
to explore.
Two seventeenth-century passacaglias,
from Georg Muffat and Johann Caspar Kerll, rarely if ever heard on the modern
or indeed any other form of piano, proved not the least of the recital’s
achievements. Georg Muffat’s G minor piece, from his 1690 Apparatus musico-organisticus, revealed kinship with music from contemporary
clavecinistes, early keyboard
composers (Frescobaldi came to mind more than once), and later composers from
Bach to Brahms, and perhaps even beyond to Busoni. Delicate, responsive,
variegated in a developmental sense, Levit’s performance had one feel as well
as observe the composer’s balance between detail and longer line: not so
different, after all, from Beethoven. Harmony was relished; harmonic motion was
meaningfully conveyed. So too were the surprises Muffat sprang for us: no
underlining, ‘just’ musical understanding and communication. It had all the
inevitability of Hegel’s owl of Minerva taking flight, yet none of that old
bird’s baggage. Levit’s performance of Kerll’s piece had all the virtues of his
Muffat and likewise all of its particularity. Voice-leading, quite without
narcissism, was nonetheless to die for. Its directed freedom created form
before our ears. We travelled from intimacy to exultancy, the latter never
failing to nurture continuation of the former from within.
In between came Frederic
Rzewski’s 2014 Dreams II, written for
Levit (and previously heard by me at
the Wigmore Hall in 2015). Its four movements did, whether as work or
performance, what they said in their titles – ‘Bells’, ‘Fireflies’, ‘Ruins’, ‘Wake
up’ – without conforming to mere expectation, without questioning as well as
fulfilling. Indeed, questioning seemed to be very much part and parcel of their
fulfilment. The first movement seemed to relate both to Debussy and to Webern,
but that was never the point, not even the starting point, in a performance of calibrated
drama. Increasingly seductive warmth proved anything but antithetical to
crystalline clarity. Febrile and flickering, the second movement burned with
mercurial heat. The pianist’s riveting virtuosity once again spoke from
apparently Debussyan roots, yet who speaks or thinks of roots in relation to
fireflies? Rzewski’s ‘Ruins’ seemed known – ruins tend to – yet the more one
listened, the more one realised one had not known them at all. Again, ruins
tend to be like that. Their (re)discovery was a wayward process that built on
the previous two movements, yet was very much its own thing. The final movement
was shaped, dramatised as keenly as Beethoven – or Muffat. Somehow, it seemed
already to be hinting at Busoni, not least in its dynamic form and its
toccata-like qualities. In its improvisatory reminiscence-cum-creation of
whimsical childhood memories it spoke too of dreams, of their magic, of their
power.
Like Doktor Faust, Busoni’s fantasia has the quality of a summa, even a summa theologica. Levit’s ‘Preludio corale’ seemed already to
encompass the entirety of his instrument in considerably more than mere
compass. Questing, like Faust, like Busoni, to bring order out of chaos, the
process was never complete, yet no less real like that. Good German (convert)
that he was, Busoni believed in werden
rather than sein. Beethoven and Liszt
flashed by, the pianist-composer’s battle with Bach but one of the dramas, the theologies
at stake here. With lightly-worn – insofar as possible! – virtuosity and veiled
clarity, Levit proved a sure guide, though whether to the inferno or to
paradise was rightly never clear. Busoni’s Sonatina
seconda from two years later (1912) hung in the air, suspended, yet somehow
also flayed alive. The fugal path was soon upon us, the first of Busoni’s four
a further, developmental prelude in miniature (not-so-very miniature)
Transition was, it seemed, everything; so too was that journey to the limits of
which the pianist had spoken in the programme. Alternative paths to a twentieth
century that never quite was, Schoenberg be damned, opened up before us in the
Intermezzo and Variations. This, it seemed, was veritable necromancy, but
whose? What was the cadenza, and what was the following fugue? The answer was,
on one level, perfectly clear; yet it seemed to miss the point entirely.
Transition, again, was all. Neo-Lisztian peroration pointed more to the
impossibility of completion than Bach could ever have done. If a ‘point’ there
were, perhaps it was that. Or perhaps it was the melting encore, the
Bach-Busoni Chorale Prelude, ‘Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland’. Mephistopheles does
not always have the last word.
Beethoven:
Thirty-Three
Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli,
op.120
Rzewski:
The
People United will never be Defeated!
Igor Levit (piano)
Following Igor Levit’s Goldberg Variations two nights previously,
we now relaxed with a little light music. A programme of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations – how often would
that appear in the first half of a concert? – and Frederic Rzewski’s The People United will never be Defeated!
(not, as I misnamed it in the former review, in a bizarre, unconscious Anglicisation,
‘The People United shall not be Defeated’!) evidently, quite rightly, thrilled pianist
and audience alike, eliciting a rare Wigmore Hall standing ovation.
First, then, Beethoven’s thirty-three
variations on what he may or may not have called a Schusterfleck (‘cobbler’s patch’), the latter theme taken faster
than I can recall, yet fleet rather than harried. The first six variations had
a sense of an exposition, only to have their parameters transformed,
transfigured, blown to smithereens. Smiling yet serious – echoes, I thought of
the G major Sonata, op.14 no.2 – the first variation proved beautifully
variegated, though never arch. Who could not have smiled at the lovely,
throwaway final phrase? Almost pointillistic Mendelssohn in the second was
followed by a third variation as seductive as anything in Liszt, its whispered,
Schumannesque confidences serving only to remind one that there is little, save
in Chopin, that nineteenth-century Romantic piano music does not owe to
Beethoven. By the time we reached the fourth variation, Beethoven’s
transformative method was clear – and, just as much to the point, felt: not
just between variations but within them. The Lisztian sense of two hands
becoming one was duly apparent in the fifth variation, the sixth showing
harmonic proliferation – variation form notwithstanding – well under way.
And so, the stage had been set
for what we might think of – and surely experienced as – gigantic development
and finale (i.e. development upon development). Beethoven and the idea of
Beethoven so condition how we understand German and much other music thereafter
– perhaps not Ravel, who spoke of ‘le grand sourd’ – that the very idea of
musical development is well-nigh impossible to dissociate from his music. (And
why should anyone try?) At any rate, I heard the remainder less as individual
variations – and I suspect that was at least in part owed to the performance.
All tendencies – modernist, Romantic, Classical, even Bachian – came more into
their own, whilst at the same time combining to make the sense of a whole still
stronger. Dialectics. Major and minor, oscillation between which Charles Rosen
famously discussed as a hallmark of the Classical style, and other dialectical
poles truly became the stuff of musical argument. Pauses, syncopations, a
simple V-I progression all told: again in themselves and as part of something
much greater. Can music go beyond the late Beethoven sonatas? If so – and many
would say it does in the late quartets – it did here, just as the Ninth
Symphony, in a rare meaningful performance, will beyond its eight predecessors.
Indeed, I drew thematic and harmonic connections with the rest of Beethoven’s
œuvre, with musical history more broadly; not for nothing did another great culmination,
the Missa solemnis, come to mind. The
array of contrapuntal procedures heard here, however, was far more
developmental; this is not the alienated masterpiece Adorno discerned in
Beethoven’s Mass. It is still a set of variations, after all. I am not sure,
though, that I have ever heard this work sound so productively difficult and engaging.
A bold, confident statement
announced Rzewski’s panoramic set of variations, immediately varied. Grand
Romanticism, Webern-like pointillism, so much was more or less immediately
thrown into the mix, direct and elusive. Here the opposites were more obvious,
perhaps, but Rzewski’s – and Levit’s – aims here were different: the desire to
give voice recalled to me, perhaps eccentrically, Henze’s song-cycle, Voices. Levit stretched the keyboard, it
seemed, to many of its limits, to bring to life a very different world from
Beethoven’s, one in which one might see and hear events in Chile on the
television, one in which solidarity and class consciousness were both more
advanced and more under siege, as well as entirely different in nature. The
musical questions were different too – or were they? That there were no easy
answers was not the least hallmark of this performance, as well as reflection
upon it. Transcendental virtuosity was required – and received. Monumentalism
too: perhaps in the opposite direction from Beethoven, Rzewski self-consciously
returning at times to hyper-Romanticism. Equally present, however, was
poignancy, never more so than in those whistled memories, never quite the same.
There could be no passive listening here, any more than political quietism. Is
the work ‘too much’? Perhaps, but some might say the same of Beethoven. And
what does that really mean? Nothing, probably. Through the piano and through Levit, it seemed, both
composers spoke; so too did humanity.
John
Harbison: North and South, Book I: ‘Late Air’ (2001) Charles Wuorinen: Twang (1989)
Hedy
West (arr. Michèle Brourman): 500 Miles (1961, world premiere of arrangement)
John
Corigliano: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (2017, world premiere)
Bolcom:
Graceful
Ghost Rag (1970)
Frederic
Rzewski: War Songs no.1 (2008)
Gordon
Lightfoot (arr. Brourman): Black Day in July (1968, world premiere)
Peter
Yarrow (arr. Brourman): Sweet Survivor (1978, world premiere)
Corigliano:
MetaMusic: ‘Dodecaphonia’ (1997); ‘Marvellous
Invention’ (2001); ‘End of the Line’ (2008)
Lucy Schaufer (mezzo-soprano)
Huw Watkins (piano)
Wild Plum Arts is ‘determined to get new music written and performed. If
you’re a composer,’ we read on the front page of its website,’ we would like to
help you. If you’re not a composer, but you like new music or even the idea of new music, and you want to do something to
support its creation, we hope you’ll help us to get this done.’ This
late night Friday Wigmore Hall concert was its first concert. Highly enjoyable
and interesting in itself, it also augured well for whatever the future might
bring; to put it another way, your support would clearly both be appreciated
and rewarded.
Co-founder Lucy Schaufer teamed up with pianist (and composer)
Huw Watkins in a programme of music by American composers, all born in 1938,
and all save one (Hedy West) still with us. Schaufer told us that this had been
a dream of hers since she had been a student at Tanglewood; now that dream had
become reality. Her engaging introductions, both to the concert proper and to
many of the items not only informed and entertained, but drew the audience in,
made the evening feel as much a gathering of friends – which, in many ways, is
precisely what it was – as a public occasion.
‘I feel good’ from William Bolcom’s Minicabs was the first of several very brief Bolcom song contributions,
the others ‘People Change’, ‘Food Song’, and the closing ‘Finale: Mystery of the
Song?’ There was something of an American Poulenc to the wit on display,
although the miniaturism told of something different. In these, as in the other
songs we hear, Schaufer proved the consummate hostess, teacher, and confidante,
Watkins very much her equal, her chamber music partner. Sometimes he had the
field to himself, shining equally in the toccata-like Joan Tower Or like a … an Engine, Bolcom’s own ‘Graceful Ghost Rag’ from Three Ghost Rags, and Frederic Rzewski’s Wae Songs no.1, which served
very well as an introduction to an over protest songs, Gordon Lightfoot’s Black Day in July, a response to civil
unrest in Detroit’, ‘motor city’, and to Peter Yarrow’s (Peter as in Peter,
Paul, and Mary) Sweet Survivor, wistfully
looking back at those headier days.
The sheer variety of styles and motivations might have
overwhelmed or made for a less than satisfying whole, yet such was not the case
in the slightest. This was a programme in the best sense curated, both on paper
and in the hall. Schaufer’s generosity of taste and spirit shone through,
ensuring that even if, in the abstract, some of the music might not have been ‘your
sort of thing’, you would most likely have been happy indeed to have your
preconceptions challenged, perhaps even your mind and ears opened. And so, if
all too predictably, the greatest find for me in abstracto proved to be Charles Wuorinen’s Twang, somehow both as knotty and as blinding in its clarity as the
late Stravinsky (Webern too perhaps?) after which it seemed to take, neither I
nor anyone else was listening in
abstracto. Categories dissolved or transformed. This was an evening of song
– and above all of song in performance.
Please do, at the very least, have a look at Wild Plum Arts’s website. Whether you feel able
or willing to contribute to the long-term goal of acquiring ‘a secluded property in which to run an artists’
residence,’ or would just like to watch the composer interview videos – the two
need not be mutually exclusive – it is surely worth a few minutes of your time.
So too, I am sure, will the next concert be. For these artists, next stop is
the Buxton Festival, thence to Ravinia.
Mendelssohn:
Songs
without words: op.19b/1, 4; op.38/6
Mahler
(arr. Ronald Stevenson): Symphony
no.10, ‘Adagio’
Igor Levit (piano)
With Dallapiccola I made a
serious mistake. ... I missed a lesson because I had gone to visit some friends
in London, and when I came back from London I found a letter saying that
Maestro Dallapiccola felt that I was not the kind of student that he wanted,
needed to work with, and would I please go somewhere else. And I realised that
I had made a serious mistake ... I must have given the impression of arrogance
... And now, it’s one thing I’ve always regretted, because I certainly could
have gotten a lot from that man if I had approached him correctly.
With those rueful, rather
moving words, spoken in a 1984 interview, Frederic Rzewski described the
foreshortening of his lessons from Luigi Dallapiccola. Reading them when writing
a chapter on the latter composer’s Il
prigioniero for my book, After Wagner,
sparked my interest. The other principal spark, slightly later, came from the now
celebrated recording and performances (such as this)
of Rzewski’s The People United will Never
Be Defeated by Igor Levit. Now, a little under three years later, Levit
gave the first performance, on Rzewski’s eightieth birthday, of a similarly
lengthy new piano work by the composer: Ages,
commissioned by the Wigmore Hall with the support of Annette Scawen Morreau.
Size is not everything; in many
ways, it is nothing. (Ask Webern – although concision there is, of course
something.) It would nevertheless be vain to insist – and I shall not try –
that the scale of canvas, the generosity and ambition of work and performance
were irrelevant, for they were not. Ages
seems in some sense to play – although the composer insists that ‘the music
does not “mean” anything – with ideas both of the ages of man and ‘“ages” in
the sense of epochs, or periods, of history: stone, ice, digital and so on’. In
five movements, it would almost have made a concert in itself – although I am
very glad that it did not, given the equally outstanding performances of
Mendelssohn and Mahler following the interval.
The first movement, marked ‘Solenne,
maestoso’ (according to the programme, that is: I have not seen a score),
opened, both as work and commanding performance, with an opening blow, on the
case and keys of the piano. Then came silence, followed by slow, diatonic
chords in sequence (if I remember correctly!) Not for the first time late
Liszt, in spirit although hardly straightforwardly in language or other musical
writing, came to mind. A long diminuendo and responding crescendo led into a
typically gestural, post-Webern splash, responded to in what sounded almost
akin to Shostakovich-style humour. (Not for nothing, perhaps, has the pianist
recently been devoting himself to Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues.) An aspirant tango came into aural view. And
so on. I thought, here and throughout the work, ofa vast wall frieze – except that it passed us
by, rather than vice versa.
Maximalism of a kind and something more minimal, if not quite the latter’s –ism,
played with each other, with us. Such, I think, was familiar from The People United; yet it was never
quite the same, never retreading old ground. Moreover, Levit’s fullness of
tone, whether in Rzewski’s furious outbursts or ‘maestoso’ progress, had to be
heard to be believed. At one point, a slow, quiet phrase – perhaps foretelling
the monodic lines of the Mahler Adagio
in the second half – threatened to morph into the subject of the Art of Fugue. It did not; indeed,
nothing one predicted ever quite
happened. BACH? I think so, as indeed I would continue to think so throughout;
but again, who is to say that certain intervals must refer to what we think
they do? In some pieces, it is clear: here rather less so. Toys and whistles
came and went, even old-fashioned video game (I think) cries and boings. I
could not help but recall a notorious
caricature of Mahler.
‘Free; slow, espressivo’ is the
marking for the second movement. It seemed at times, especially to begin with,
almost to be in the mould of a Russian mesto
movement. Textures were very different, slowly transforming. Liszt, even
Mussorgsky (‘Bydlo’) came to my mind briefly in the bass, the figure, whatever
it ‘was’, swiftly transforming itself into a melodic (near-)sequence. Many such
‘Romantic’ gestures were to be heard, without suspicion of mere pastiche. Levit
proved himself a handy percussionist, knocking on the piano’s case, in the
third movement, marked ‘Robotic’. Such knocks eventually provoked, from
underneath the keyboard, pitch resonances, returning him and us to the keyboard
proper. There was something menacing, even dead, here to the knowing clichés:
robotic, one might say. A cyber clockwork orange, perhaps? Moaning cries from
the pianists, one suggestive perhaps of an air-raid signal, had one audience
member seek refuge outside the hall. Our passions, of whatever sense, seemed
momentarily united in the chorale, ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’. Was that
Shostakovich again, not cited but suggested? Allusion or not? Figures we might
have heard previously – the lack of certainty perhaps part of the point – led us
into a lazy jazz ornamentation of Purcell’s Music
for a While, which had, perhaps, been hinted at earlier. Coaxing that
wonderful melody into a later, more chromatic pianistic world, Rzewski and
Levit developed it in various ways, always at least a little surprising,
whistled fragmentation included. There was even an organ-style ‘prelude’ to be
heard. (Yes, I know that pianists used to ‘prelude’ too, but here the inner
parts suggested a particular organist brand of legato, at least to this renegade organist.) A reckless cry of ‘Yee-ha!’
could not help but have political resonances as our ‘leaders’ prepared to bomb
Syria.
The fourth movement, ‘Each note
an age; glacial’, seemed aptly to have been around for a while (music for a
while…) before it fully dawned upon us. At a (relatively) glacial pace, the
music had me think once again about the question of certain intervals, their
potential references, and how they might or might not fit together: Purcell and
Bach in particular. Is an interval sometimes just an interval? Almost
certainly. Quirky figures, perhaps self-consciously so, announced the final
movement, ‘Too fast to last’, presumably in some sense the ‘digital age’. Levit’s
digits certainly had a good deal of work to do here. I thought of Mussorgsky’s ‘Baba
Yaga’, again from his Pictures. The wild
woman eemed eventually to speak freely, but was that my fancy, my illusion? If
this were a broken toccata, as I thought of it, by whom it had been broken?
Ages were telescoping, perhaps telescoped. Repeated notes, fast, decreasing in
volume, took us – or did they? – to a disembodied, again somehow Lisztian final
chord.
The second part of the concert
opened with three Mendelssohn Songs
without words, heard in performances more delectable than I could ever have
imagined. The E major piece, op.19b
no.1, showed Mendelssohn to be every inch, every note the equal of Schumann.
Likewise its successor, the fourth from the same book, revelling in the dignity
of its harmonic progressions. A feather-light final phrase was simply to die
for. It was again Schumann, if not quite, that I thought of in the ‘Duetto’,
op.38 no.6. A good-natured contest between the world of the former’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien and a Lutheran,
devotional character ensued.
Ronald Stevenson’s
transcription of the first movement from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony fascinated; in
Levit’s performance, it both thrilled and satisfied too. The opening,
Parsifalian monody sounded almost as if in search of another Song without words, although it was soon
clear that we were almost, yet never quite, in the world of Schoenberg. Without
strings, Mahler’s harmonies perhaps sounded all the more radical, all the more
of our time rather than his. (There need not be any such opposition; that,
perhaps, is the more important point.) It was, at any rate, interesting to
consider how much of a difference equal temperament made, or did not. Marionettes
from the ‘Rückert’ symphonies and the Ninth’s ‘Rondo-Burleske’ did their thing
as enigmatically as ever. When the monody returned, it was perhaps more
suggestive now of Tristan; was that
Mahler’s doing, his transcriber’s, his pianist’s, or the listener’s? Who knows?
Such, in a sense, is the magic of music. I relished the way dances of death
turned from Mendelssohn to Rzewski and back. Or did they? Were they deathly at
all? A grand tremolo, perhaps inevitably, was employed for that horrendous chord. What else, however, could Stevenson have
done? And again, there was something almost Lisztian to the serenity
experienced in the shadow of that trauma. As ever, Mahler’s Adagio proved both complete, especially
in so well-shaped a performance, and not. The next century of musical history
was both immanent – and not. Mahler remains.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Ode to
Napoleon Buonaparte (Byron) for speaker, piano and string quartet, Op. 41
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Fifteen
Variations with a Fugue in E-flat major, op. 35 – “Eroica Variations” FREDERIC RZEWSKI The People
United Will Never Be Defeated!
‘Why
write?’
‘What Jean-Paul Sartre says in
his essay, What is Literature?, about
the problem “why write?”, is witnessed in utterly authentic fashion in
Schoenberg’s creative necessity.’ Luigi Nono’s Darmstadt lecture, from which
those words are taken, focused on Schoenberg’s post-war cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw, but those words
were intended more broadly. Schoenberg’s wartime Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte is as overt a work of ‘political ‘commitment’
as A Survivor or any of his
posthumous son-in-law’s works, indeed as any work by Beethoven or Frederic
Rzewski. In the words of Sartre, as quoted by Nono (himself transcribed by the
young Helmut Lachenmann, another composer very much of this ilk): ‘If I am presented
with this world and its injustices, then I should not look at it coldly, but
... with indignation, that I might expose it and create it in its nature as
injustice and abuse.’
Luigi Nono, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Bruno Maderna (?)
Denunciation
and developing variation
The day following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in Californian exile from the National
Socialism whose genocidal tendencies he had long feared, Schoenberg heard on
the wireless Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’ address. A month later, in January
1942, the League of Composers, which had previously sponsored the American
premiere (under Stokowski) of Schoenberg’s Die
glückliche Hand, offered him a commission, for its twentieth anniversary,
for a ‘short chamber work’, which Schoenberg composed between March and June of
that year, although, concerned that it might not be well enough performed by
the commissioning forces, Schoenberg withheld it until 1944, when it received
its premiere in New York.
The words and their
meaning were of great importance to Schoenberg. He hoped, alas vainly, that
Orson Welles, whose radio work had greatly impressed him might act as speaker:
one of those great musical might-have-beens. Byron’s excoriating ode, allegedly
to, yet unmistakeably against, Napoleon, offered a clear contemporary parallel
to Hitler. ‘I knew,’ the composer said with specific reference to this work,
that ‘it was the moral duty of intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.’
Unlike, say, in Pierrot lunaire,
there is no straightforward cabaret, no sense of recitation as artfulness. The
words are to be heard as words, but the mode of their expression is crucial.
Schoenberg insisted to another pupil, Heinrich Jalowetz, who was preparing a
recording, on the requirement fora
large number of ‘shades, essential to express one hundred and seventy kinds of
derision, sarcasm, hatred, ridicule, contempt, condemnation, etc., which I
tried to portray in my music.’ In that vein, not only might Bonaparte become
Hitler, not only might Byron’s reference to the Emperor’s Habsburg bride, ‘proud
Austria’s mournful flower’, evoke Schoenberg’s post-Anschluss homeland, but also Byron’s ‘Cincinnatus of the West … bequeath’d the
name of Washington’ might yet inspire Roosevelt, whose speech had so inspired
Schoenberg at the outset.
Allusions to the Marseillaise and to Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony – its Morse Code, ‘V for Victory’ connotations especially popular at
this time – nevertheless make their musico-dramatic points amongst ‘The triumph
and the vanity, the rapture of the strife – the earthquake voice of Victory,’
and the countervailing ‘Dark spirit! what must be the madness of thy memory!’ And yet, for all the post-Wagnerism of Schoenberg’s conception
here of the artist and his role in society, of the artistic work and its angry,
political standing, it is with a motivic working born of neo-Brahmsian musical
integrity, every note and its placing crucial to the composer’s idea of
‘developing variation’, that the score leads shatteringly to a conclusion both
encompassing and negating E-flat major. That Schoenbergian struggle between
Brahms and Wagner which we can trace back at least as far as the programmatic
string sextet, Verklärte Nacht,
continues to develop, to take on new meaning. We can argue endlessly about when
our ears may first lay claim to detect that tonal reference, for there are
various ‘traditional’ triads, even major and minor ones, which are derived from
the work’s determining hexachord. There can be no doubt, however, which
masterwork stands before those ears, its humanism honoured and deconstructed;
it is Beethoven’s Sinfonia
eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uomo. Its
tonality clearly troubled Schoenberg, and yet it clearly mattered. He responded
somewhat defensively: ‘It is true that the Ode
at the end sounds like E-flat. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was wrong,
but at present you cannot make me feel like this.’
‘A new style’: preparing the way for the Eroica
Beethoven’s
so-called Eroica Variations make a
playful, complicating backward step in Igor Levit’s programming tonight.
Variation form has sometimes, erroneously considered an ugly sister amongst
earlier Classical forms, as if Mozart, Haydn, and others had written nothing of
worth. Nevertheless, Beethoven certainly seems to have considered his work in
this genre in 1802, an F major set, op.34, immediately preceding this E-flat
major work, to have offered something of a new departure. ‘‘I have made two sets of variations,’ he wrote to Breitkopf
& Härtel; ‘both are written in quite a new style and each in an entirely
different way … you will never regret the two works. … I myself can assure you
that in both works the style is completely new for me.’ Leaving aside special
pleading to a publisher, an art at which Beethoven was no amateur, the scope
and scale of these works is indeed new for the composer, just as his Third, Eroica Symphony would mark a significant
development from his first two essays in the genre.
Whereas, in the op.34 set, Beethoven had startlingly composed each
variation in a different key, taking us through a pattern of falling thirds, the
tonal plan of the E-flat Variations adheres to tradition, each variation
written in the tonic, until a turn to the minore,
followed by a slow, ornate Largo
movement, prior to a brilliant, barnstorming finale. There is more than one way
to be radical, though, and what could be more radical than to open with an
Introduction that presents only the bass of the theme, presented in ghostly octaves,
with a rudely jesting wake-up call a little after half the way through (itself
following a bar’s silence)? The first three variations treat, with ever more
complicated texture, with that bass – and then, at last, the theme!
Taken from his ballet, The Creatures
of Prometheus, op.43 (do not be misled by the later opus number) as well as
a little Contredanse, that sixteen-bar theme proceeds to be ‘varied’, the
importance, even primacy, of melody reinstated, if nevertheless far from uncontested.
(How could it be, following those introductory variations?) The melody and its
variations are now dependent on the bass, and perhaps vice versa too: a typically Beethovenian dialectic.Many typical variational devices are
revisited: crossing of hands, syncopation between those hands, canonical play,
introduction of triplets and other note values. Prophetically for Beethoven,
the finale, now on the grandest of scales, is fugal; here the subject is not
the melody but again the bass.
When Beethoven next employed this theme and bass, in his Eroica Symphony, it would be in a work
whose political frame of reference was more overt, Bonaparte’s name furiously
scribbled out upon his self-proclamation as Emperor, replaced with a generic,
universal tribute to the ‘memory of a great man’. Much, although far from all,
of Beethoven’s method had been outlined here.
The
People United: the musician as ‘organiser and redistributor of energies’
Rzewski is a fine pianist in his own right; he gave, in 1962, the first
performance of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück
X, and performed works by, amongst others, Boulez, Cage, Bussotti, and
Kagel. Not entirely unlike Schoenberg and Beethoven, he would turn to more
overtly political writing and other activity – if again like them, far from
unequivocally – in his case, in the wake of the turmoil of the late 1960s. Perhaps
not entirely unlike Eisler, whose work Rzewski has also performed, he had
developed a wariness of avant-gardism, concerned that it might unwittingly
divorce itself from urgent political matters. These words from 1968 were to
prove indicative of one important tendency within his subsequent work.
We are all ‘musicians’. We are
all ‘creators’. Music is a creative process in which we can all share, and the
closer we can come to each other in this process, abandoning esoteric
categories and professional elitism, the closer we can all come to the ancient
idea of music as a universal language … The musician takes on a new function:
he is no longer the mythical star, elevated to a sham glory and authority, but
rather an unseen worker, using his skill to help others less prepared than he
to experience the miracle, to become great artists in a few minutes ... His
role is that of organiser and redistributor of energies; he draws upon the raw
human resources at hand and reshapes them ...
Whilst it is perhaps all too easy to draw a contrast between Boulezian
ghosts of an imaginary ‘Darmstadt’ and such words, Rzewski’s growing interest
in socialist ideas of collective improvisation, in use of popular and folk
melodies, would have been anathema to many of the composers whose work he had
previously, enthusiastically been performing.
Such interest may certainly be seen – and heard – in his set of thirty-six
variations on a theme by Sergio Ortega:
¡El
pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! Initially intended as an anthem
for Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, it gained further revolutionary
currency as a symbol of resistance both within Chile and without, following Allende’s
overthrow and murder. The theme, as one might expect, is
presented in forthright fashion: a focus of revolutionary inspiration, one
might think. (Might we also hear a kinship with Beethoven’s bass?)Yet
there is no sense of presenting music that all could play, far from it; its
variations are unabashedly, heroically virtuosic. From Webern-like pointillism
of the first variation, ‘Weaving, delicate but firm’ – a tribute to, or
distancing from, Boulez and Stockhausen? – through something not so far from
shellshock in the face of repression in the third variation, we traverse an
almost incredible array of styles and procedures. We may not find them all to
our taste, as they range from Rachmaninov-like grand pianism to minimalism,
from Ravel back – or forward – to Webern. That, however, is surely part of the
point. The people are diverse yet united: musically and politically.
Let
us conclude, then, by returning to Nono, a composer who might well have
appeared in a variation upon this programme – his first
acknowledged work, his orchestral Variazoni
canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Arnold Schönberg, could hardly have
been more explicit in its tribute –and
his claim: ‘The genesis of any of my works is always to be found in a human
“provocation”: an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my
instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness.’ Such a
claim is rich in possibility not only for the works heard this evening, yet
equally, and in one case, still more so, for works and performances inspired by
them. (This essay was first publishedin a 2017 Salzburg Festival programme to accompany a recital given by Igor Levit and friends.)
These ones are just to be noted as diary items, for which apologies. I normally try to write something up irrespective of whether I have had a press ticket, but in this case, time has run away and I have had to restrict myself. In any case, both concerts will, I am sure, have been extensively reviewed elsewhere - and I shall publish my programme note to the first concert next month anyway. Both were excellent, the concert from Igor Levit and friends quite outstanding, as you might have expected. My silence means nothing more than a lack of time in this case...
Grosser Saal, Mozarteum (12 August 2017)
Schoenberg:
Ode to Napoleon
Buonaparte, op.41
Beethoven:
Fifteen Variations with a Fugue in E-flat
major, ‘Eroica Variations’, op.35
Rzewski:
The
People United will Never be Defeated!
Igor Levit (piano)
Dorte Lyssewski (speaker)
Klangforum Wien (Sophie
Schafleitner, Annette Bik (violins), Dimitrios Polisoidis (viola), Andreas
Lindenbaum (cello))
Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (15 August 2017)
Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg
Boris Timofeyevich Izmailov –
Dmitri Ulyanov
Zinoviy Borisovich Izmailov –
Maxim Paster
Katerina Lvovna Izmailova –
Evgenia Muraveva
Sergei – Brandon Jovanovich
Aksinya, Woman Convict –
Tatyana Kravtsova
Shabby Peasant – Andrei Popov
Millhand – Igor Onishchenko
Coachman, Teacher – Vasily
Efimov
Porter, Sentry – Oleg
Budaratskiy
Pope – Stanislav Trofimov
Chief of Police – Alexey
Shishlyaev
Policeman, Office - Valentin
Anikin
Sonyetka – Ksenia Dudnikova
Old Convict – Andrii Goniukov
Manager – Gleb Peryazev
First Worker – Martin Müller
Oleg Zalytskiy – Second Worker,
Drunken Guest
Third Worker – Ilya Kutyukin
Andreas Kriegenburg (director)
Harald B. Thor (set designs)
Tanja Hofmann (costumes)
Stefan Bolliger (lighting)
Christian Arseni (dramaturgy)
Concert Association of the
Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)
Angelika-Prokopp-Summer Academy
of the Vienna Philharmonic
Rzewski – Dreams: Part Two Rzewski – The People United will Never be Defeated!
Igor Levit (piano)
Cornelius Cardew: now perhaps
most celebrated, notorious even, for the Scratch Orchestra, his polemical Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and the
still unexplained circumstances of his death at the hands of a hit-and-run
driver. We do not have so many opportunities to hear his music. The previous
occasion I had, I am afraid I emerged nonplussed. Much depends, I suspect, upon
which music. Whilst I struggle to
find Cardew’s Thälmann Variations a
masterpiece – and was that what he was trying to accomplish in any case – I found
it a far more interesting work than the pieces I had heard in
2011. The Variations were written in 1974 to remember Ernst Thälmann, the
Communist leader imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis and incorporate Hanns
Eisler’s Heimliche Aufmarsch and the
protest song set by Charles Koechlin, Libérons
Thaelmann!
What of the music, in a
performance from Igor Levit that left none who heard it that the work was
receiving as convincing advocacy as it could ever hope for? The theme is odd,
sounding more like Auld Lang Syne as
it progresses, yet starting with a slightly unfortunate post hoc hint of the Dynasty theme tune. (Confessions of a
strangly misspent youth!) Levit played it as beautifully as he would have done
Liszt, and indeed the harmonies sound a little like a strange mix of earlyish, straightforward
Liszt and early-twentieth-century English music. Moreover, the first variation
calls for a technique not so far removed from the Lisztian, which Levit
possesses in spades, before Auld Lang
Syne comes closer in its successor. The seriousness with which Levit
approached and accomplished his task was admirable. Connections with other music,
whether through the score itself or the beauty and warmth of his touch,
manifested themselves throughout: Debussyan open fifths and Liszt again in the
slow section, which might almost have been the core of a nineteenth-century
sonata. (How I should love to hear Levit in the B minor Sonata, or the Dante!) If it were there that I thought,
reactionary bourgeois, empire-serving modernist that I am, that the Variations
veered dangerously close to sentimentality, that was certainly not true of the
performance. I cannot say that I found the closing march ‘a complex “march of
events”,’ (Cardew) but that doubtless depends on what one understands by ‘complex’;
it was certainly not without incident. This emerged as the most
interesting Cardew piece and performance I have heard.
Frederic Rzewski’s 2014
second part of Dreams, after Akiro Kurosawa’s
film, received its British premiere, Levit having given the first performance
three months earlier in Heidelberg. It is a co-commission by Heidelberger
Frühling, Carnegie Hall, and the Wigmore Hall, with the support of André
Hoffmann. The first movement, ‘Bells’, I am afraid I found over-extended, but
again, I am as sure as I can be that that was not to be attributed to Levit’s
performance. Performance, perhaps more than the music ‘itself’, brought Debussy
again to mind; this was tintinnabulation more compelling, at least, than the ‘holy
minimalist’ – may God preserve our souls! – variety. There were intriguing Schoenbergian
harmonies to be heard too, and, if I am not being unduly fanciful, also renewed
Lisztian associations, suggesting that a performer’s touch (almost) alone can
create such resonances. (I am reminded of Sir Donald Tovey’s remark that Liszt’s
piano music told us that here was a pianist who could not help but draw a
beautiful sound from the instrument.) ‘Fireflies’ (no.6 out of 8) is, as one
might expect, vividly pictorial, Levit superseding what sounded like formidable
technical challenges. ‘Ruins’, for me the most interesting of the four
movements heard, announces a theme as if for variations of some sort –
thoughtful programming, as one might expect – but which is immediately
developed contrapuntally. As Paul Griffiths noted in the programme, this ‘could
be the bass for a chaconne, but one broken or unfinished’. It guides progress,
at times almost Bach-like, then seems, if this makes any sense, to desist from
doing so for a while. The performer’s task in such music is often to import at
least some sense of continuity to (apparent or otherwise) discontinuity; Levit
certainly did. Just as he navigated tremolando touch, voicing, harmonic motion,
and so on, surely knowingly pointing up likenesses to Liszt’s Bach – and not
just BACH – variations. The movement even occasionally sounded neo-Lisztian in
form at some times. Apart, that is, from an intervention by mobile telephone. The
fourth movement, ‘Wake Up’, states simple early material, apparently from a
melody by the singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, and then progresses
toccata-like. An initial comparison I made mentally to the finale of Prokofiev’s
Seventh Piano Sonata failed, when a less single-minded – or, to put it another
way, more varied – trajectory emerged. Perhaps this is the broken landscape of
post-modernity. Was that a BACH reference I heard, or perhaps a little later, a
DSCH one? I am really not sure; my ears might have been playing tricks. Perhaps
that is part of the point.
After a highly impressive
first half, Levit truly surpassed himself in an all-encompassing performance of
Rzewski’s classic The People will Never
be Defeated, which takes, as many readers will know, its theme from Sergio
Ortega’s ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será
vencido!, initially intended as an anthem for Salvador Allende’s
Popular Unity coalition, gaining further revolutionary currency as a symbol of
resistance both within Chile and without, following the overthrow and murder of
Allende. That theme here sounded forthright, catchy, even slinky: just the inspiring
thing. The Webern-like treatment of the first variation had us believing in
every note (just as a great performance of Webern will, despite his rather more
sparing manner!), whilst its successor seemed somehow to fill in some of the
gaps left by such pointillism. It was the extraordinary, human variety of
treatments, both in work and performance, that most of all struck – just as it
surely should. This stands, one might say and despite the difference in form
and genre, closer to Mahler’s conception of the symphony than to Sibelius’s.
And so, in the third variation, ‘Slightly slower, with expressive nuances,’ an
experience not so far removed from shellshock in the face of repression could be
felt.
Voicing, again, was cared for
as if Levit were playing Chopin – and it was interesting to hear how much the
music could be made to sound like Chopin’s, or indeed Rachmaninov’s. (At one
stage, the Rhapsody on a Theme of
Paganini came to my mind.) ‘Care’ should not here be taken to imply
something pedantic; rather, it was exercised within a dynamic, goal-oriented
framework of impetus and integration, bringing us closer than we might expect
to the work’s original companion piece, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Repeated notes – the twenty-third variation, I
think – sounded worthy of Gaspard de la
nuit. As for the ‘big twenty-eight variation … an essay in boogie-woogie
minimalism’ (Griffiths), well quite: it still seemed to me as banal as the
real, minimalistic thing. But the revolution is supposed to be for everyone, I
reminded myself, slightly grudgingly. The improvisation following the final
variation started with a welcome hint of extended Webern and went on its own
path compellingly – though my memory does not permit me to retrace it now. (Is
that not perhaps part of the point of an improvisation anyway?) And yes, at the
end, the tune did emerge having ‘manifested a resilience it was designed to express
and encourage’ (Griffiths), intriguingly not unlike the return of the ‘Aria’ in
the Goldberg Variations (a work I
hear Levit is due soon to record). This was virtuosity in the very best sense,
indeed the Lisztian sense: at a musical and
technical level that would defeat any ‘mere’ virtuoso.
Meanwhile, well: look at
the neo-liberal world in which we live, the neo-liberal progeny of Pinochet’s
chums - step forward, Milton Friedman! - apparently triumphant, a Labour Party under Harriet Harman supporting
Conservative attacks upon the poor which even the Liberal Democrats opposed.
That was not the least of the reasons why I found this performance so moving;
it gave a glimmer of hope, experientially, that the heirs of Allende rather than
those of Pinochet might yet reunite, might yet even win.
